Rock and Roll

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Michael Baers

In the beginning, rock and roll music was a provocation, an affront to parents and proper citizens. As rock critic Jim Miller put it, "It was the music you loved to have them [parents] hate." The name itself was sexual, deriving from black slang for copulation. Dominated by a heavy back-beat and amplified guitars, the music was crude, raucous, easily accessible, and within a few years of its inception, tailored and marketed specifically to the young, now a consumer block of singular importance. And rock was inherently democratic. Any kid could muster up enough money for a guitar, and, gathering together three or four like-minded souls, start a band--many of the best groups were started in precisely this manner. But if the music itself was simple, its origins were not. In fact, rock and roll was the culmination of more than a century of musical cross-pollination between white and black, master and slave; a music born of miscegenation. It was in essence a post-modern medium, one of the first true products of the consumer society. With a whole array of gestures, attitudes, styles, inflections, and narratives, it was endlessly receptive to outside influences and was thus endlessly adaptable--a ground to receive all the narratives of youthful rebellion. Hence, it was far more contingent on history than other musical forms.

When parents first heard rock music in the 1950s, they heard only cacophony. They were unaware of the rich tradition behind rock and roll, that it was playing out a cultural evolution begun in slavery, a blending of musical and cultural forms--African and European, religious and secular--a syncretistic blending of two traditions of music. Prior to the Civil War, white minstrels began to copy the styles of the plantation orchestras, becoming the rage of Europe and America. These slave orchestras had learned a smattering of European dance tunes, which they combined with traditional African forms played on European instruments (not too dissimilar from the lutes and fiddles used by African griots--storytellers--of the Savannah), adapting their traditional music in ways both overt and clandestine, and thereby continuing a cultural heritage that had been in effect outlawed by the slaves' owners. By the time of rock's inception, this musical cross-fertilization had already occurred several times over, creating jazz, blues, gospel, western swing, and rhythm and blues.

These new musical forms--western swing, rhythm and blues, jump blues--proliferated in the years following World War II, the result of migrations out of the rural South and Southwest, as well as greater dissemination through radio and records. Many country musicians introduced blues tunes into their repertoire, while Delta blues musicians adapted to urban nightclubs with electric guitars and small combo arrangements. In the Southwest, small combos and jazz orchestras were combining blues vocals and arrangements with raucous saxophones and a backbeat-heavy rhythm section that spread from its Texas-Oklahoma roots west to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The birth of rock, however, centers around Memphis and a few farsighted individuals. Sam Phillips moved to Memphis in 1945, lured by the black music that had been his lifelong passion. He set up Sun Studios, recording Beale Street blues musicians, moonlighting and engineering demos to make ends meet. In 1951 he recorded "Rocket 88" by Ike Turner. It became a number-one rhythm and blues hit and is considered by many to be the first rock and roll song. Phillips himself was not concerned with race, but he knew intuitively that all the music he recorded would remain "race" music until a white man recorded it. He boasted to friends that if he could find a white singer who sang like a black man, he would make them both rich.

Memphis was home to a particularly energetic urban blues movement and a magnet for poor blacks and whites seeking to escape the grinding poverty of the countryside. The Presley family was characteristic of this pattern, moving there from rural Mississippi after World War II. They lived in the federal housing (the best housing they had ever had), and the illiterate Vernon Presley got a job driving a truck. Their son majored in shop at Hume High School, where he was regularly beaten for his long hair and effeminate appearance, but despite these eccentricities, it was anticipated that he would follow in his father's marginal footsteps, working some menial job and perhaps playing music on the side.

Elvis Presley's genius lay in his capacity to absorb different influences. He watched Rebel without a Cause a dozen times, cultivating a James Dean sneer and memorizing whole pages of dialogue, and visited the late-night gospel revivals, absorbing the religious frenzy. He listened to the radio, to the black gospel stations and groundbreaking DJ Dewey Phillips on WHBQ. At a time when Memphis itself was thoroughly segregated, Phillips was one of the first DJs in the country with an integrated set-list, playing blues and country alongside each other, and his influence on Elvis was evident by the songs on the singer's first legendary Sun single--"I'm All Right, Mama," a blues by well-known Delta transplant Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, and bluegrasser Bill Monroe's country hit "Blue Moon of Kentucky." The bluesy "I'm All Right, Mama" was countrified, featuring a country-style guitar solo, while Monroe's classic was delivered with a rollicking back beat and a vocal delivery unlike any country singer; Presley sang with the fervor of the gospel musicians he loved to watch. This single 45, the culmination of two hundred years of musical cross-pollination, changed the music forever, and because Presley was white (an early radio interviewer made a point of asking what high school Elvis went to simply to prove that this was so), the entire nature of the music industry was stood on its head.